Deus Ex Musica

Beethoven transformed music—but has veneration of him stifled his successors?

Recent scholarship shows that Beethoven was perpetually buffeted by political forces.

Illustration by Daniel Adel

Beethoven is a singularity in the history of art—a phenomenon of dazzling and disconcerting force. He not only left his mark on all subsequent composers but also molded entire institutions. The professional orchestra arose, in large measure, as a vehicle for the incessant performance of Beethoven’s symphonies. The art of conducting emerged in his wake. The modern piano bears the imprint of his demand for a more resonant and flexible instrument. Recording technology evolved with Beethoven in mind: the first commercial 33⅓ r.p.m. LP, in 1931, contained the Fifth Symphony, and the duration of first-generation compact disks was fixed at seventy-five minutes so that the Ninth Symphony could unfurl without interruption. After Beethoven, the concert hall came to be seen not as a venue for diverse, meandering entertainments but as an austere memorial to artistic majesty. Listening underwent a fundamental change. To follow Beethoven’s dense, driving narratives, one had to lean forward and pay close attention. The musicians’ platform became the stage of an invisible drama, the temple of a sonic revelation.

Above all, Beethoven shaped the identity of what came to be known as classical music. In the course of the nineteenth century, dead composers began to crowd out the living on concert programs, and a canon of masterpieces materialized, with Beethoven front and center. As the scholar William Weber has established, this fetishizing of the past can be tracked with mathematical precision, as a rising line on a graph: in Leipzig, the percentage of works by deceased composers went from eleven per cent in 1782 to seventy-six per cent in 1870. Weber sees an 1807 Leipzig performance of Beethoven’s Third Symphony, the titanic, turbulent “Eroica,” as a turning point: the work was brought back a week later, “by demand,” taking a place of honor at the end of the program. Likewise, a critic wrote of the Second Symphony, “It demands to be played again, and yet again, by even the most accomplished orchestra.” More than anything, it was the mesmerizing intricacy of Beethoven’s constructions—his way of building large structures from the obsessive development of curt motifs—that made the repertory culture of classical music possible. This is not to say that Beethoven’s predecessors, giants on the order of Bach, Haydn, and Mozart, fail to reward repeated listening with their cerebral games of variation. In the case of Beethoven, though, the process becomes addictive, irresistible. No composer labors so hard to stave off boredom, to occupy the mind of one who might be hearing or playing a particular piece for the tenth or the hundredth time.

And so Beethoven assumed the problematic status of a secular god, his shadow falling on those who came after him, and even on those who came before him. Already in his own lifetime, the hyperbole was intensifying. In 1810, the author and composer E. T. A. Hoffmann, celebrated for his tales of the fantastical and the uncanny, published an extraordinary review of the Fifth Symphony:

Beethoven’s instrumental music unveils before us the realm of the mighty and the immeasurable. Here shining rays of light shoot through the darkness of night, and we become aware of giant shadows swaying back and forth, moving ever closer around us and destroying within us all feeling but the pain of infinite yearning, in which every desire, leaping up in sounds of exultation, sinks back and disappears. . . . Beethoven’s music sets in motion the machinery of awe, of fear, of terror, of pain.

This is criticism in a new key. Music is being accorded powers at once transcendent and transformative: it hovers far above the ordinary world, yet it also reaches down and alters the course of human events. Beethoven’s music went some ways toward fulfilling the colossal role that Hoffmann devised for it. Epoch after epoch, Beethoven has been the composer of the march of time: from the revolutions of 1848 and 1849, when performances of the symphonies became associated with the longing for liberty; to the Second World War, when the opening notes of the Fifth were linked to the short-short-short-long Morse code for “V,” as in “victory”; and 1989, when Leonard Bernstein conducted the Ninth near the fallen Berlin Wall. “We ourselves appear to become mythologized in the process of identifying with this music,” the scholar Scott Burnham has written. Yet the idolatry has had a stifling effect on subsequent generations of composers, who must compete on a playing field that was designed to prolong Beethoven’s glory. As a teen-ager, I contemplated becoming a composer; attending a concert at Symphony Hall, in Boston, I remember seeing, with wonder and dismay, the single name “beethoven” emblazoned on the proscenium arch. “Don’t bother,” it seemed to say.

For this conundrum—an artist almost too great for the good of his art—Beethoven himself bears little responsibility. There is no sign that he intended to oppress his successors from the grave. Although he expected that posterity would take an interest in him—otherwise he would not have saved so many of his sketches—he did not picture himself in the magniloquent terms employed by Hoffmann and others. “Everything I do apart from music is badly done and stupid,” he once wrote. And the music was the butt of withering self-criticism. On the subject of his late string quartets, which generations of listeners have hailed as a pinnacle of Western civilization, Beethoven once remarked to his publisher, “Thank God, there is less lack of imagination than ever before.” The comment remains staggering after nearly two hundred years, not merely because of the radical understatement—it would be like Shakespeare saying, “ ‘The Tempest’ is not as trite as my earlier plays”—but because of the implicit challenge to contemporary musical life. To perform Beethoven to the exclusion of the living is to display a total lack of imagination.

The continuing strength of the cult is evident in the accumulation of Beethoven books. This summer, the composer and critic Jan Swafford published a nearly thousand-page biography, titled “Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph” (Houghton Mifflin). It follows on John Suchet’s “Beethoven: The Man Revealed” (Atlantic Monthly); Nicholas Mathew’s “Political Beethoven” (Cambridge); Matthew Guerrieri’s “The First Four Notes,” a cultural history of the opening motif of the Fifth Symphony (Knopf); Michael Broyles’s “Beethoven in America” (Indiana); and a novel, Sanford Friedman’s “Conversations with Beethoven” (N.Y.R.B. Classics). These books, all from the past three years, join a library of thousands of volumes, going back to Johann Aloys Schlosser’s biography of 1827, which, just a few months after Beethoven’s death, designated him the ne plus ultra: “His art reached a level far above what others will attain.”

Swafford’s book is intended not as a specialist study but as a comprehensive introduction to Beethoven’s life and music. It is the heftiest English-language Beethoven biography since the multivolume work undertaken in the nineteenth century by the American librarian Alexander Wheelock Thayer—a project completed and revised by others. Swafford, in his introduction, declares his fondness for Thayer’s Victorian storytelling and belittles modern musicological revisionism. He writes, “Now and then in the course of an artist’s biographical history, it comes time to strip away the decades of accumulated theories and postures and look at the subject as clearly and plainly as possible.” He also distances himself from the psychological approach of Maynard Solomon, who, in his 1977 biography, attempted to place Beethoven on a Freudian couch. Though Swafford does not look away from the composer’s less attractive traits—his brusqueness, his crudeness, his alcoholism, his paranoia—the portrait is ultimately admiring.

Hoffmann, in his 1810 essay, appropriated Beethoven for the Romantic movement. Swafford concurs with the more recent tendency—adopted by, among others, Solomon and the pianist-author Charles Rosen—to see the composer as a late manifestation of the Enlightenment spirit, an artist who prized free thought within rational limits. He “never really absorbed the Romantic age,” Swafford writes. In this view, Beethoven instead stayed true to the ideals that prevailed in his native city of Bonn, where Maximilian Franz, the Elector of Cologne and the brother of the Habsburg emperor Joseph II, presided over a short-lived intellectual flowering. Swafford is hardly the first author to observe how fortunate Beethoven was to come of age in such an environment: his grandfather, the Flemish-born musician Ludwig van Beethoven, had served as Kapellmeister in Bonn, and Christian Gottlob Neefe, his principal teacher, instilled in him progressive literary influences. When Beethoven was in his early twenties, he was already thinking of setting to music Friedrich Schiller’s “Ode to Joy,” with its call for universal brotherhood. More mundanely, Bonn’s connections to Vienna helped to establish Beethoven in the imperial city, to which he moved in 1792.

Swafford colorfully evokes Beethoven’s first years in Vienna: his initial triumphs as a composer and a pianist, his canny manipulations of patrons and critics, the terrifying discovery of early signs of deafness, his apparent thoughts of suicide, and his defiant emergence, in the first years of the nineteenth century, as the creator of the “Eroica” and the Fifth, the “Appassionata” and Waldstein Sonatas, and the Razumovsky Quartets. At a time when Napoleon was overturning the old order, Beethoven seemed to launch a comparable coup, and he nurtured an ambivalent fascination for the French Revolutionary milieu, to the point of contemplating a move to Paris. Swafford plausibly suggests that the “Eroica” is a tribute to the “power of the heroic leader, the benevolent despot, to change himself and the world”—an Enlightenment document with revolutionary trappings. As Swafford recognizes, too much is made of the hoary anecdote of Beethoven striking Napoleon’s name from the manuscript after hearing that the leader had crowned himself emperor. He did indeed erase the phrase “titled Bonaparte,” but kept the words “written on Bonaparte,” and referred to the symphony as his “Bonaparte” even after Napoleon had taken an imperial title. The subsequent decision, in 1806, to publish the work as a “Sinfonia Eroica” may have had a pragmatic basis: at that time, Austria was at war with France, and a Napoleon Symphony would have been ill-advised.

Swafford has a marvellous chapter on the music of the “Eroica,” restoring freshness to a very familiar score. He shows how Beethoven composed not episode by episode but toward a predetermined climax—a dizzying, collagelike sequence of variations on an impish theme previously associated with Beethoven’s ballet “The Creatures of Prometheus.” The striding E-flat-major theme of the opening movement is related to the variation theme (both are defined by B-flats above and below), and its swift descent to a discordant C-sharp—an inversion of a more innocent-seeming chromatic slide in the “Prometheus” theme—creates an instability that leads to shocking orchestral violence and finds resolution only at the very end. Furthermore, the usual image of Beethoven the furious smith, binding all notes to a fundamental idea, gives way to a welcome emphasis on the composer’s wit and his love of dancing rhythm. Swafford ingeniously connects the “Eroica” finale—whose theme is based on the popular dance known as the Englische—with a passage in Schiller’s correspondence that sees the Englische as a symbol of an ideal society in which “each seems only to be following his own inclination, yet without ever getting in the way of anybody else . . . the assertion of one’s own freedom and regard for the freedom of others.”

Impassioned and informed, “Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph” stands far above the chatty biography by Suchet, a British television anchor and radio host, who, when the documentary record thins out, supplies fan-fiction scenarios of, say, Beethoven’s conversations with Haydn. Yet Swafford lacks the elegant discipline of Solomon, who traverses Beethoven’s life in four hundred-odd pages, or the analytical precision of William Kinderman and Lewis Lockwood, whose book-length treatments of Beethoven, published in 1995 and 2003, respectively, are rich in insight. A ruthless editor might have saved Swafford from frequent repetition and occasional rhetorical excess (“Surely in music there had never been a more beautiful, a more profound evocation of tranquility and Arcadian peace”).

Still, Swafford’s exuberance is infectious, prompting the reader to revisit works both famous and obscure. I found myself dwelling on the “Harp” Quartet, a transitional piece from 1809 that often receives little more than a glance in the Beethoven literature. (There is, however, a monograph devoted to it: Markand Thakar’s “Looking for the ‘Harp’ Quartet.”) Swafford spends a couple of pages on the “Harp,” noting how a catchy little pattern in the first movement—rising pizzicato figures traded between instruments at the end of the first-theme statement—becomes increasingly significant. Indeed, the pizzicatos seem to overrun the score in an almost anarchic manner, destabilizing its form and releasing rowdy energies. You get the feeling that Beethoven initially believed he was writing a market-pleasing throwaway and then found the project growing steadily more tangled and complex. Or perhaps he meant all along to veer off course. The joy of listening to Beethoven is comparable to the pleasure of reading Joyce: the most paranoid, overdetermined interpretation is probably the correct one.

How did Beethoven become “beethoven”? What prompted the “great transformation of musical taste,” to take a phrase from William Weber—the shift on the concert stage from a living culture to a necrophiliac one? The simplest answer might be that Beethoven was so crushingly sublime that posterity capitulated. But no one is well served by history in the style of superhero comics. This composer, too, was shaped by circumstances, and he happened to reach his maturity just as listeners of an intellectual bent, such as E. T. A. Hoffmann, were primed for an oversized figure, an emperor of an expanding musical realm. The scholar Mark Evan Bonds, in his new book “Absolute Music,” describes the “growing conviction at the turn of the nineteenth century that music had the capacity to disclose the ‘wonders’ of the universe in ways that words could not, and that the greatest composers were in effect oracles, intermediaries between the divine and the human.” As Bonds observes, people had spoken of Mozart’s genius but had not referred to him “as a genius.” With Beethoven, genius became a distinct identity, fashioned by the self rather than furnished by God.

[cartoon id="a18601"]

Politics also assisted in Beethoven’s elevation. The disorder of the Napoleonic Wars, which redrew the map of Europe and ended the Holy Roman Empire, caused many to look toward music as a refuge. Amid universal chaos, Beethoven exuded supreme authority. Moreover, the burgeoning of his reputation, notably in Hoffmann’s 1810 review of the Fifth Symphony, coincided with a movement that the early-twentieth-century theorist Carl Schmitt identified as “political Romanticism”—a pan-German nostalgia for vanished medieval Christendom and mythic national roots. Beethoven, despite his cosmopolitan Enlightenment background, was not immune to such sentiments. Several recent scholarly studies, notably Mathew’s “Political Beethoven” and Stephen Rumph’s 2004 book, “Beethoven After Napoleon,” have scrutinized Beethoven’s shifting alliances in his final years, detecting political implications even in the otherworldly realm of the last string quartets. This would seem to be the kind of work that Swafford dismisses as so much posturing, but it sheds new light on the origins of the Beethoven phenomenon.

Both Rumph and Mathew, who teach at the University of Washington and at the Universty of California at Berkeley, respectively, address the usual suspects—the Third, the Fifth, and the Ninth Symphonies, “Fidelio,” and the “Missa Solemnis”—but they also focus on a group of propagandistic scores that many Beethoven enthusiasts would rather ignore. Napoleon occupied Vienna in 1809, amid an upwelling of patriotic feeling in the Austrian population, and Beethoven, notwithstanding his earlier French proclivities, rose with the anti-French tide. In 1813, he wrote “Wellington’s Victory,” an orchestral battle piece commemorating Wellington’s defeat of Napoleonic forces at Vitoria, and the next year saw the production of “The Glorious Moment,” a bombastic choral cantata honoring the Congress of Vienna and the resurrection of Austrian might. Earlier scholars have dismissed these pieces as regrettable detours or treated them as exercises in irony and parody. Both Rumph and Mathew take them seriously, as stations in the development of Beethoven’s late style. Rumph points out that the coda of “Wellington’s Victory,” with its breakneck double fugue, anticipates the contrapuntal jubilation near the end of the Ninth. Beethoven himself took some pride in the work, annotating a critic’s negative commentary with the words “What I shit is better than anything you have ever thought.”

Biographers have long argued that the turmoil of the Napoleonic period and the subsequent restoration of traditional monarchic rule led Beethoven to escape into a private, visionary world. They also tend to assume that his deafness isolated him from everyday concerns. Rumph, by contrast, offers a novel and unsettling picture of a composer increasingly conservative in his beliefs, drifting toward the aesthetic nationalism of the “political Romantics.” The hallmarks of Beethoven’s final period—a growing fondness for departed masters, notably Bach and Handel; a taste for polyphony and counterpoint; a cultivation of free-spirited, sometimes naïvely folkish lyricism—appear as signs not of progressivism but of retrenchment. In this reading, even the Ninth Symphony, an apparent burst of late-period idealism, becomes a somewhat reactionary utterance, in which the imperious bass solo at the beginning of the finale—“O friends, not these tones!”—asserts itself as a voice of redemptive authority.

Mathew, in “Political Beethoven,” makes a less provocative argument, though in the end his interpretation carries startlingly broad implications. He portrays a composer perpetually buffeted by political forces from the start of his career: several striking pages of the book evoke the militarized sonic landscape of Vienna in the Napoleonic years, with fanfares, marches, and belligerent songs echoing from all corners. Beethoven adopted this militaristic vocabulary but translated it into a more rarefied instrumental language. This displacement becomes even more pronounced in the Ninth Symphony and the “Missa Solemnis,” which, Mathew says, “retain a political ambience, with all the trumpets and drums, hymns, and heroic outbursts,” but omit explicit political references. The finale of the Ninth has the momentum of immense forces being called up and mobilized for some mighty task. But what? Esteban Buch’s 1999 book, “Beethoven’s Ninth: A Political History,” documents the symphony’s status in ever-revolving contexts, from German chauvinism to Marxist internationalism and on to the liberal pieties of the European Union, which has annexed the “Ode to Joy” as its official anthem.

“The late music turns its audience into exegetes,” Mathew writes. The aura of history unfolding before our ears, of figures rushing into the future at a prestissimo tempo, sends us into a fury of interpretation. Here, perhaps, is the core of the Beethoven phenomenon. He achieved unprecedented autonomy, refusing to abase himself before aristocratic patrons even as he took their money. Most of his major scores make their argument in abstract, nondescriptive terms, under the titles sonata, quartet, concerto, and symphony. Yet a paradox hovers over this liberation from servility and utility: in breaking away from its present, the music becomes captive to its future. The Ninth and the “Missa Solemnis,” Mathew writes, are “occasional works perpetually in search of an occasion.” And, in harnessing their power to our own dreams and passions, we are in danger of wearing them out, turning them into hollow signifiers. There is a “perpetual risk of emptiness.” More than a risk: the final chapter of Guerrieri’s “The First Four Notes” chronicles E. T. A. Hoffmann’s vehicle of awe and terror being turned into a meaningless blur of disco beats, hip-hop samples, jingles, and ringtones.

Can Beethoven ever elude the fate of monumental meaninglessness to which he seems consigned? Mathew concludes, persuasively, that we need to “recover a sense of the contingent and the illogical” in him: his ambition, his opportunism, his digressions, his lapses of taste, even his failures. Lesser Beethoven creations such as “Wellington’s Victory” and “The Glorious Moment”—the “bad” Beethoven—reveal a working musician vulnerable to doldrums. And if you acknowledge the surrounding clutter of Beethoven’s era—Mathew mentions such curiosities as Ignaz Moscheles’s piano sonata “Vienna’s Feelings Upon the Return of His Majesty Franz the First Emperor of Austria in the Year 1814”—you may gain new tolerance for the music of the present. The canon is a grand illusion generated by the erasure of a less desirable past.

Among recent publications, the one that does the most to restore Beethoven’s primal weirdness is the fictional one. Sanford Friedman, a New York writer who died in 2010, at the age of eighty-one, acquired a cult following for a series of novels, notably the 1965 gay coming-of-age story “Totempole.” The manuscript of “Conversations with Beethoven” was left unpublished at his death; N.Y.R.B. Classics has done a service in bringing it to light, since intelligent novels on the subject of composers—or musicians of any kind—rarely come along. Furthermore, this Beethoven novel depicts not his years of triumph but his squalid final months, when he often had the appearance of a decrepit monster.

Friedman takes inspiration from the notebooks through which Beethoven communicated with friends and acquaintances once his deafness had made ordinary discourse impossible. Frustratingly, the “conversation books,” as these volumes are known, preserve most of what was said to Beethoven but little of what he said in return: he had not lost the power of speech, and usually had no need to write down his own words. Much of the time, the chatter is trivial (“What did the wax candle cost?”), but from time to time Beethoven is asked a question that we would love to have him answer:

Are you writing an opera or an oratorio?

You knew Mozart; where did you see him?

Was Mozart a good pianoforte player?

Friedman seizes on the frustration and makes it productive. He uses the format of the one-sided dialogue to narrate the last months of Beethoven’s life, quoting relatively little of the notebooks themselves but inserting much biographical fact and plausible fiction. By keeping the composer largely silent, Friedman avoids the trap of trying to capture his subject’s “true” voice or thoughts. Instead, Beethoven speaks in the reader’s imagination. And, despite the oblique method, the voice is all too vividly audible.

The novel opens in July, 1826, with the attempted suicide of Beethoven’s nineteen-year-old nephew, Karl. The woes of Karl dominated the composer’s final years to a disquieting degree. The boy’s father, Beethoven’s brother Kaspar Anton Karl, had died in 1815, and Beethoven subsequently waged a vituperative custody battle with Karl’s mother, Johanna, whom he considered “extremely depraved” and “malevolent.” In one letter, Beethoven dubbed her the “Queen of the Night,” implying harlotry. Johanna had some character flaws—she had been jailed for embezzling a pearl necklace—but hardly deserved to have her son taken away, as Beethoven eventually succeeded in doing. Moreover, Beethoven’s efforts to guide young Karl were erratic, hectoring, and, at times, abusive. In one passage of “Conversations with Beethoven,” Anton Schindler, a devoted but devious associate, floats the rumor that Beethoven was in some way responsible for Karl’s suicide attempt:

Most everyone I know is in complete sympathy with you; only one or two hold you to blame.

It makes no difference; they are people of little

Please don’t aggravate yourself, it’s hardly worth

And there the conversation ends, with Schindler slinking from the room, as the next interlocutor reveals.

Throughout the book, we register, in our mind’s ear, Beethoven ranting, grumbling, pestering, pontificating, leering, sneering, and, above all, complaining. Especially in his final years, Beethoven was in constant misery, some of it ordained by fate and some of it self-imposed. Heavy drinking compounded other health problems and, Swafford argues, proved fatal. (The theory that the composer died of lead poisoning, publicized in the 2001 book “Beethoven’s Hair,” has been undermined by further testing of his remains.) In Friedman’s novel, doctors ask about blood in the stool and the quality of his urine. There is squabbling over money, and an almost total lack of serenity.

Friedman does give glimpses of a tender, generous spirit behind the raging façade. In a poignant moment, Beethoven is visited by young Franz Schubert, who makes hapless efforts at chitchat (“Would to God I could give you my unneeded fat!”) and nervously asks after the Master’s opinion of his songs. “You didn’t find the ringing of the convent bell overdone? Thank you, that makes me breathe easier.” The episode threatens to become sentimental, with an august elder saluting a doomed youth; yet a subsequent conversation, comparing the talents of Schubert and Beethoven’s longtime friend Johann Nepomuk Hummel, suggests that Beethoven actually prefers Hummel’s estimable but seldom shattering music. Anyone who has listened to major artists assess their heirs will find this scenario convincing.

In the novel, Beethoven is writing his final quartet, the luminous and larky Quartet in F, and gives a few warnings to a servant boy to leave the manuscript alone. Otherwise, the act of composing music goes unobserved. There are references to the Quartet in C-Sharp Minor, Opus 131, which Beethoven finished just before Karl tried to kill himself, but these concern mostly the title page. Beethoven had planned to dedicate the piece to a friend and patron, yet a few weeks before his death he decided that it should honor instead a Baron von Stutterheim, who, after Karl’s suicide attempt, had arranged to have the young man assigned to his regiment. In Friedman’s telling, Beethoven has become fearful that Stutterheim will withdraw the offer, on account of gossip, and hopes to influence the Baron by changing the dedication. Beethoven’s friend Stephan von Breuning has trouble believing that Opus 131 will be put to such a use: “No doubt he would be greatly flattered, nay more, thunderstruck! Are you sure you wish to make such a princely gesture?”

Opus 131, which indeed bears the Baron’s name, is routinely described as Beethoven’s greatest achievement, even as the greatest work ever written. Stravinsky called it “perfect, inevitable, inalterable.” It is a cosmic stream of consciousness in seven sharply contrasted movements, its free-associating structure giving the impression, in the best performances, of a collective improvisation. At the same time, it is underpinned by a developmental logic that surpasses in obsessiveness anything that came before. The first four notes of the otherworldly fugue with which the piece begins undergo continual permutations, some obvious and some subtle to the point of being conspiratorial. Whereas the Fifth Symphony hammers at its four-note motto in ways that any child can perceive, Opus 131 requires a lifetime of contemplation. (Schubert asked to hear it a few days before he died.) It seems impossible to reconcile this music with the sordid family drama behind the Stutterheim dedication. Yet “Conversations with Beethoven” forces this task on us. The novel refuses to wallow in the mystery of genius: instead, through a kind of photographic negative, it gives a picture of a mind fuelled by extreme dissatisfaction, almost thriving on squalor.

When Friedman arrives at Beethoven’s final hours, the gloom lifts a little. A familiar tale has the dying Beethoven shaking his fist at the heavens amid a thunderstorm. Given the fabulist tendencies of Beethoven’s friends, there is no reason to believe the story, although meteorological records confirm the thunderstorm. I am happy to have Friedman’s alternative version, which is told through the person of Johanna van Beethoven, the sister-in-law for whom Beethoven conceived such an irrational, consuming hatred. (The reported appearance of the “Queen of the Night” at Beethoven’s bedside was sufficiently surprising that many biographers, Swafford included, assume a case of mistaken identity.) Friedman invents a scene of reconciliation between them, albeit one in which Beethoven is hallucinating visitations from his mother and from the Daughter of Elysium in the “Ode to Joy.” The novel ends with a long letter from Johanna to Karl, contesting the shaking-the-fist story: “Your uncle’s countenance . . . far from defiant, was utterly grave and beseeching. Just what your Uncle asked for, I have no idea, naturally; but I suspect that it was something for which there are no words, something—Fist indeed! his hand was cupped as though holding a small bird. In my opinion what he asked for, and in fact, received, was permission to die.”

The one fairly reliable story we have from Beethoven’s deathbed is less poetic, though fully characteristic. Three days before the end, Schindler reported in a letter that Beethoven had said, “Plaudite, amici, comoedia finita est” (“Applaud, friends, the comedy is over”). We know that the composer liked the phrase, because “Applaudite amici” appears in the sketchbooks for the “Missa Solemnis,” over the fugue theme of the Credo. It is evidently a paraphrase of the last words of Augustus Caesar: “Since the play has been so good, clap your hands.” Beethoven may have found the anecdote in Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland’s “Macrobiotics, or the Art of Prolonging Human Life,” which is mentioned in the conversation books of the “Missa Solemnis” period. Perhaps Beethoven was mocking his doctors; perhaps he was mocking the priest who administered the last rites; perhaps he was mocking himself. In any event, he was laughing about something as the curtain came down. He presumably did not know that, like the Emperor Augustus, he was about to undergo deification. ♦

Alex Ross, the magazine’s music critic since 1996, is the author of “The Rest Is Noise” and “Listen to This.”